Senator Lankford Pays Impromptu Visit to Liberty

Senator James Lankford (R) from Oklahoma paid an impromptu visit to Liberty University’s campus on Feb. 1 and taped a segment for the Fox News talk show “The Ingraham Angle” from Liberty’s television studios in Green Hall.

Sen. Lankford had just left a Republican Party policy retreat in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia.

Only the day before, on Jan. 31, Lankford and other members of Congress were aboard an Amtrak train, which crashed into a dump truck in Crozet, Virginia on the way to the retreat. Lankford and the other senators were unharmed, but one fatality on the track was confirmed.

Lankford stopped in Lynchburg the next day to visit his daughter Hannah, a student at Liberty. He had intended a short visit before returning to Oklahoma.

“I’ve never been on this part of campus,” Sen. Lankford said, sitting in studio B in Green Hall. “It was unexpected that the Laura Ingraham program contacted us to be on the show, so Liberty was kind enough to open their studio to us and link us up on satellite.”

Lankford was broadcasted during the 10 p.m. show, with his daughter, Hannah, sitting beside him as he weighed in on the FISA memo declassification issue and on Andrew McCabe’s role in the Clinton email investigation. Lankford sits on both the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in the Senate.

Though this visit to campus went nearly undetected, Lankford will be returning to Liberty on Feb. 26 to address the student body at Convocation, where he said he hopes to bring a slightly different kind of message from other political speakers that have visited Liberty in the past few years.

“As odd as it may sound, it won’t be a political message as much as it will be more about calling and future, and where we are and where we’re going,” Lankford said. “I was in youth ministry 22 years before I went to Congress. So this’ll be more of me putting on my ministry hat and talking to students about the ‘Now what?’ of life. Obviously, there will be some political stories in there as well. It’s just part of the conversation of what’s going on right now for me. But it will be a lot less political and a lot of just hard stuff.”

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